It is only days when I was talking about a cold war déjà vu and here is Russia asking Bulgaria to explain its plans to deploy US air defence missiles on her soil targeting – always according to Moscow – Russia. According to Sofia the only thing that has happened is talks between Washington and Bulgaria for the possibility to host those missiles and always according to the Bulgarians everything is under negotiation. And the truth is that with the economic situation in Bulgaria nearly in ruins any financial help will be welcome and the Americans pay well.

The other truth is that financially the Bulgarians own their survival till now to the Russians and not to the Americans. Even lately with the new plans to create a new nuclear plan they have first of all to negotiate with Russian companies and then they have to borrow money from the Russians to build it. Schizophrenic? Perhaps but in a way this I the reality of the former members of the Warsaw Pact! All of them are tied in a strange chain of exchanges with Russia and all of them will do anything to cross to the other side and tie themselves with Washington. Oddly independency or at least tie closer with Europe hasn’t occur to them yet!

When Bulgaria joined the European Union was expecting miracles. The governments and the local annalists were expecting that all the economic problems of the country would finish in one night and the money will start flooding the country. Unemployment would go down to 5% and inflation will disappear. They even started calculating how long it will take them to become members of the Euro-zone and start using the Euro. Nothing like that happened.

On the contrary a decade after and even though Euro looks strong in the international market the countries of the Euro-zone start dealing with the reality of a strong currency but an insufficient legal background and even though we only hear about Greece lately, things don’t look very well even in the heart of the Euro-zone, in Germany; not to mention how bad is really the British economy. At least they still use the pound or whatever remains from the pound.

So instead of the expected growth with the support of the European funds they found out that they have to borrow more money – especially facing the international economic crisis – from private especially American banks with high interest. The same time trembling inside corruption problems and an unstable political environment they found that EU didn’t do much for their international credibility leading them to borrow with constantly increasing interest and in the end just enough to pay back former loans.

What remained was to sell …soil! And that’s what they are doing. Of course the usual populists anti-Russians that have become so popular the last decades in all east Europe are helping with their anti-soviet propaganda making you wander if they have realize that the Soviet union is over and that Russia has more to do with the old Czar regime than with communism. But the thing is that at the moment they are useful. You just need to look at Poland to understand how useful they can be and how expensively Poland has sold their membership to NATO and EU a decade ago.

The Russians ask for an explanation but what they are really going to get is another negotiation or better an auction on who is going to give more. Are either the Americans who will get the missile bases they want so much in Europe or the Russians who don’t want those bases in their neighbourhood.

Another interesting question is why Barrack Obama continues this policy George W. Bush started and during his campaign period he found questionable himself.